and love's the burning boy
-disclaimer to be found in first chapter
(What kind of scale compares the weight of two beauties/ the gravity of duty/or the groundspeed of joy/ Tell me, what kind of gage can quantify elation/ what kind of equation could I possibly employ)- Ani DiFranco, School Night.
chapter two: weapon
Draco is sitting at the kitchen table in Harry's apartment, again. The sunlight raining in the open window makes everything in the room glow and melt gold into its own shadow. Harry has one of those crystal suncatchers hanging in the window that splits the light into shards of rainbow that stain the walls and the table and the floor. Harry isn't here; Draco heard him leave early this morning, while he himself was still curled up shivering on the couch under three layers of blankets. Both of them are used to this by now- showing up at one another's doors sometime past midnight, looking for someone to convince them that morning will still come, even after everything. Harry is always matter-of-fact about it; he leans in the door half-asleep, green eyes hazy and unfocused, and calmly offers Draco a cup of coffee. Then, Draco swears at Harry and pushes past him to the liquor cabinet. He doesn't start shaking until later, after Harry's gone back to bed. Then, he sits in the dark kitchen and stares at his hands and remembers a play he once read, and the only reason he doesn't get up to wash his hands again is that Harry might hear him, and worry, more than he already does. Harry has read Shakespeare too, and he knows about guilt.
On the table there are three things- a typewriter, a bottle, a knife. The sun is caught swimming in the translucent amber of the half-empty bottle of scotch. Draco's typewriter doesn't quite accord with the poetic simplicity of the scene, which is why he likes it where it is. The page in it just now is blank. Draco got up this morning with a pounding headache and the intention of writing a letter, then clearing out of Harry's apartment and taking the underground back to his own place, where he could get some work done on the short story he is supposed to be writing for the New Yorker. He has been staring at the blank white paper for nearly an hour, and he can't remember who he was going to address the letter to, or what he was planning to say.
Draco picks up the knife, carefully, because he knows exactly how sharp it is. Spellbound silver, charmed not to dull, not ever. He finds his own reflection faraway and distorted in the narrow blade, which is etched with ancient magic and stained (scarred) with more than one blood. An assassin's knife, so it has no name engraved in the hilt- one of the first things Draco ever owned that did not have the family crest somewhere ostentatiously displayed. The first thing Draco did with this knife was a piece of fairly simple impromptu self-surgery; not the sort of thing one finds in medical textbooks. It was risky, uncertain work, judging just how deep he had to cut to go beneath that enchanted ink, knowing how narrow the margin of error was. Draco thinks, now, that he would not have had the nerve to do it, if he had cared too much about the risk, the result.
It's worse when Harry comes to Draco's apartment. Draco learned enough from those three years of war and betrayal (which is never what they call it, now) that he could have kept his eyes blank and his mouth shut while they tore out his throat (while they murdered his mother.) But while Draco was a spy and an assassin, Harry was a hero, a crusader, and he wears his heart like armour. So it's worse when Harry shows up at Draco's door, because Harry has never been very good at pretending. Draco can see the terror, the incomprehension that he won't admit to in himself, in Harry's green eyes. So it's worse when Harry comes to Draco's apartment, memories raw and burning, visibly falling apart, far too trusting. It terrifies Draco that anyone would willingly reveal that much of themselves to him, when his hands are so practiced at sharpening knives.
The knife is an assassin's knife, enchanted to keep a record on its blade of everyone it's ever cut, invisible to everyone but Draco himself. Draco has done a lot of things he'd like to forget, but he keeps the knife because he can't forget it; the image is too compelling, too good to throw away, and he can't erase the silver etchings. At the end of the story they called him a hero. But weapons stay sharp a very long time; swords do not easily turn to ploughshares. Draco leaves the knife with Harry most of the time, now, because Harry knows how to handle weapons.
Which is, of course, exactly what Draco is. He likes the neatness of that, the many levels, the play on words. His own personal extended metaphor. He adds detail, another concrete image, grinning wryly at the implied comparison, the clever twist in characterization. A little dramatic, he thinks critically, but interesting anyway. A weapon: dangerous, always, and uncertain enough about his loyalties that for a long time he was a knife with no hilt, half-made, sharp at every edge. There are always those so desperate for a weapon that they will risk anything. Draco is used to being used- for a long time it didn't matter to him which side he was wielded by. So he spent a few razor years in the service of one Tom Marvolo Riddle, learning the lessons of loyalty, power, and fear. Then, afterwards, Albus Dumbledore was not so very different. There are only two people who have never used Draco. Both of them have green eyes. One of them he loves, and one, he knows, loves him.
Draco reaches for the bottle of sunshot amber liquid and downs another bitter mouthful. His hand looks gold through the glass. He closes his eyes and turns his face blindly to the sun, imagining, for one second, gentle, strong hands cupping his face, and green eyes.
Sometimes Draco thinks he's colourblind, or fixated, because he knows her eyes, pain-dark, brilliant, flecked with gold, are not the right green eyes. Still, he can love her sometimes- although he's never been able to explain how it happened, two people with so many sharp edges and so many scars. It doesn't make sense that sometimes around her he feels something almost like hope, almost like happiness, when other times they can barely speak to each other without opening up old wounds. It doesn't make sense that every time he leaves(because she never leaves, Draco thinks- Ginny is stubborn, she'd rather fight it out, fists and shouting and breaking glass. Draco can't decide whether this is brave or only stupid; sometimes he thinks it's both.) But it doesn't make sense that every time he lets her go they're backing away from each other across the room, still holding hands as long as they can across the space between. She's got the wrong green eyes, but she loved him first, and she believed in him enough for both of them. She loved him first, and green is green. Ginny Weasley makes Draco wish he'd never been a weapon, because then he could have loved her, he thinks, without destroying her, without being destroyed.
He is still staring at an empty page, blinding white in the morning sun. He's tired of all this symbolism, and of knowing the scene he's written into. Once upon a time would do just fine, for a change. At least then he'd know how to finish it. He's still staring at an empty page, because although he knows he's good with words, there's nothing he can think of left to say.
What he writes, in the end, is "I love you. I'm sorry." And even then, he doesn't know who it is he's writing to.
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that's it. chapter three coming soon to a theatre near you. reviews are good.